


Drift

by PhoenixAccio



Category: Half Life VR But The AI Is Self-Aware, Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Autistic Benrey (Half-Life), Black Mesa Sweet Voice, Body Horror, Brain Damage, Coma, Drift Bond, Drifting with a Kaiju Brain, Injury Recovery, Kaiju Benry, M/M, Mind Meld, Other, Sensory Overload, but in like. a not weird way, theyre drifting its just the drift
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:47:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24796399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhoenixAccio/pseuds/PhoenixAccio
Summary: Gordon tries something desperate to restore Benrey's humanity, and pays the price.
Relationships: Benrey/Gordon Freeman
Comments: 3
Kudos: 90





	Drift

**Author's Note:**

> this is from an au where gordon and benrey are drift partners and benrey drifts with the kaiju brain like newt does, which messes with his genetic structure somehow and turns him into a kaiju. i understand that that's Not How It Works but also this is an au and it's benrey so who cares. anyways enjoy

Benry couldn't think. He screeched in too-many voices, light and sound and movement spinning through his skull through his mutated ears and too-many half-blind eyes. Everything was too fast and too loud and too much and he felt like his being was folding in on himself, sensation familiar from memories no longer within his reach. Benry couldn't stop screaming, and his mind spun as he staggered through the space he found himself in. Words wouldn't come when he tried to speak, but he didn't know what he'd have said anyways. He didn't even know if anyone was there to hear him. The world spun. Benry reeled.

Something happened.

The feeling was an island of clarity in the whirlwind of blurry too-fast almost-thought, a sudden expansion of his consciousness like something being plugged in. The connection was open and distinct. It felt human, like Benry almost remembered being able to feel, and he grasped onto it desperately. The Drift, his mind supplied, the first thought he remembered having that was stable enough for words. The name came with a burst of feeling, of connection and understanding and the familiarity of a bond well-worn. Benry pushed further.

"Benry?"

The voice came from the Drift-Link at the back of Benry's tempestuous thoughts, and Benry reached for it again in response.

"Benry, I don't know if you can hear me, or understand me at all like this, but you need to calm down. You need to try to calm yourself down, you're going to hurt someone, they might hurt you--"

Benry heard the voice say his name, he recognized his name for what it was, and reached for that clarity again. The voice on the Drift-Link's other end didn't seem to feel that Benry could hear it. Benry wanted it to know, he wanted them to know he was still in here, whatever that really meant. As he got closer to the voice in the back of his mind, Benry's words started to come back to him, just a little.

"--need to calm down," came the voice from the link in Benry's head, and Benry understood.

I am calm, said a part of his mind, but Benry trusted the new voice in his head. He knew it, soul-deep and instinctual, and he trusted that if the voice said he needed to calm down, it must be right. Now Benry just needed to figure out how to slow the winds of his mind down enough to make that possible. He closed his too-many eyes, and cupped his gnarled, warped hands over his ears. Senses, he needed to block his senses out, they only made things worse too-sensitive and too-dull at once as they were. He breathed, half remembering times before he'd felt like this and the voice had brought him down. He breathed, and he calmed down, slowly, curling into himself as his body and mind slowed down from their spinning, awful mass. Calm. When he felt back, the Link was still there, but it fell away beneath his fingers like so much ash, incense and burnt cigarettes and other things he could almost remember, right at the edge of his quietening head. Where was it, where was he, where did he go--

Calm. He was calm. Benry was calm, and he was going to check. When Benry opened his eyes, they were duplicate, and clear. The clouded hundreds from before melted back into his hide-pelt-skin like all of his spines. Benry opened his human eyes and saw the face of the man plugged into that familiar machine they'd been working on ever since Benry drifted with that great dying Kaiju. The Kaiju Drift helmet, because that was what he'd been, Benry realized. He'd been, and to a point was, a Kaiju, and Gordon, his partner, had drifted with him to save him, disregarding the danger he must have understood. Gordon had drifted with him, and now Gordon was unconscious-maybe-dead lying motionless in the Drift setup and Benry remembered the crumble of his consciousness's presence in his mind and felt his heart, or whatever it was now, drop in his ribcage.

"Gordon!" he shouted, or at least tried to. The name came out garbled to incomprehensibility on his misshapen tongue. Not meant for human speech, he registered uncomfortably. There was a high hum in the back of his throat as he spoke, bubbles of red and grey floating out like little gems or blood droplets in the void of space, with nobody to hear Benry comprehensible or not. Grey wasn't the colour of blood or gems, but Benry didn't have time for thoughts that made sense, because Benry's Drift Partner, his best, closest friend, was motionless and limp in his Drift gear, and Benry couldn't tell if he was breathing. He tried again, and it sounded a little better this time, to Benry's ears, at least, but how was he to know?

"Gordon!"

He scrambled over to Gordon's body, relaxing when he saw Gordon's armoured chest rising and falling ever-so-gently. There was blood coming from places it shouldn't, though. Bloody nose and eyes and ears and sclerae vivid with burst vessels when Benry checked. Brain damage, probably, and likely Benry's fault as well, he lamented, considering it was he who reached out to him tearing and huge as he was. It was no great shock to Benry if Gordon's human mind had been broken like a mouse's fragile spine under the weight of Benry's immense grasp. He was still breathing, though, Gordon was breathing and Benry held onto that, and to the hope that that myth of Drift Partners feeling each others' deaths was one of the true ones just so he would know he hadn't felt it yet. Benry was so gentle when he pulled Gordon into his arms, terrified still to break him with shaking arms no longer large enough to do that kind of damage.

"I'm so sorry, Gordon, I'm sorry," he whispered in his new garbled voice, unpracticed and clumsy in altered anatomy. He stayed there with Gordon in his arms until the doctors physically pulled him off to look him and Gordon over, in separate rooms.

Benry's examination went quickly, but possibly only because Benry made it. He would gladly sit down for more tests later, but for now he needed to see Gordon, to know he hadn't shattered him forever. Gordon's name was one word he was getting the hang of, now. Two syllables, nice and simple, and he'd been getting lots of practice. It certainly got his point across, Benry thought. Once the scientists had apparently had their fill of tests for the day, they released Benry to a group of guards, including one he recognized as having been his friend, before, it stung that the guard seemed not to recognize Benry, but it'd been years, and he did look different. The walk to the infirmary felt immensely long, as he and his entourage made their way through the halls of Black Mesa. As soon as the infirmary doors were in sight, Benry was running, paying no heed to the disapproving guards. He pushed into the large sterile room, and put his one word to use.

"Gordon?" he rasped, looking around. A nurse waved Benry over, to the little curtained stall containing Gordon's bed. Gordon was horribly still under bright white sheets, blood and ash cleaned from his face and Drift suit traded in for hospital gown but otherwise just as Benry has found him after coming back to himself. Benry keened, and the bubbles came out again, red and grey, with a novel touch of pink. The nurse looked mildly concerned, but dismissed it, presumably having seen stranger.

"He's in a coma," the nurse informed Benry. "Brain damage. Drifting with Kaiju is not generally considered wise. Hopefully he'll wake up, but we aren't sure what he'll be like when he does."

Benry's stomach--or something like one--twisted sickeningly. His fault. He hurt Gordon. He would be the reason if Gordon never came back from this. The man had a son, Benry remembered. He'd be orphaning a child.

"Sorry," he choked out, garbled. He doubted the nurse understood him, let alone comatose Gordon himself. When the nurse left to give Benry and Gordon some privacy Benry took Gordon's too-cool hand in his, and he cried.

**Author's Note:**

> sweet voice translations:  
> red to grey - please be okay  
> pink - love


End file.
